Guiding Light
by Madhumalati
Summary: AU. A young monk in training finds a rather unusual book, and a chain of events goes very wrong. A retelling of Saiyuki from a different point of view. Add a connection. Subtract a character. This is what happens.


_**Guiding light**_

A/N: this is an AU. You'll see why. Quite possibly the weirdest oneshot I've written. It was originally a challenge to myself: add a connection, subtract a character, and write the story from the villain's point of view. This was what happened. And I do believe I've written a pairing that's never been written before. Onesided, but.

Nii (and that was the name he thought of himself by, always) was young when he found the diary; young, with a different name, still a junior monk and possessed of entirely too much curiosity and intelligence to be popular.

There was a vault in which the monks at his temple kept relics of Heaven, sacred cloths and miracle objects and other paraphernalia of a religion. It could only be accessed by the highest monks; the rest were herded through like obedient sheep on holy days, to watch and gasp at traces of power which was not theirs.

That vault contained a smaller safe, and this was never opened, not even by the sanzo priests. It contained, he found out (through whispers and rumours), some relics that had been cast down from Up There – relics of the Fallen Gods, the rebels against the true and perfect order of the worlds. Heretics, unholy men all, even their names were forbidden and lost to time. The priests kept those relics at the temple, hidden away and covered in dust, too afraid to destroy them, to afraid to study them, too afraid to throw them away.

He snuck into the vault late one night. It was unguarded – no one outside the temple valued those worthless trinkets, and those inside it were cowed by their beliefs. But he was not, and so he opened the vault – unlocked – and the safe with a handy piece of twisted metal.

It was dark, since he could not risk a light with him, and so he simply grabbed the first thing he felt inside the safe, a book. There was another one next to it, he realised, but before he could take it too, there were footsteps in the hall, and he broke and ran, panicked, avoiding the monks by seconds. They realised that something had been taken, of course, even though they were too afraid of the contents of the safe to find out what it was, and guards were posted after that, and random searches conducted among the inmates. It was months before Nii dared to dig up the book from where he had wrapped and buried it.

It was a diary, he realised, a thick volume bound in soft red leather that had (like all relics of Heaven) remained fresh and untainted by time.

With anxious fingers, he opened it in his cell, and began to read.

_I do not know who will read this. Would that no one ever will, for if this diary has been found, I am a dead man already, or will be soon. Still, there are things that I must reveal, things I must speak of, no matter how taboo they are or how dangerous – truth concealed is evil permitted existence. And I am tired enough of this place, with all its trappings and fallacies and hypocrisy, that I cannot bring myself to care about the consequences anymore._

Something like a shudder ran through him when he read those words; if he had been superstitious, foolish like the other boys in training with him, he would have felt some forbidding feeling in them. As it was, he recognised it for its truth; finally, in that last sentence, he had found words that resonated so perfectly with him.

He read the book every spare moment he had, simultaneously afraid of discovery and thrilling at the danger. It was an addictive work, full of bitter clarity and furious perception. The diary spanned years – decades of the author's life, covering every event in meticulous detail even though some names had been edited. Slowly, it came to dominate his interests, change his perceptions of what

Some entries were mundane, filled with details of military expeditions and tactics; mundane, he thought, until he began to read military strategy, intrigued by the obvious passion the diarist had for it, and realised that he had been a brilliant tactician.

Other entries were tense, hurried, suggesting and inferring things about Heaven he was unfamiliar with; but he had a quick mind, and he began, slowly, to unravel the intricate web of conspiracies in tandem with the diarist. He read histories of Up There with clear and suspicious eyes, and inch by inch, the truth of the whitewashed glory he had been bombarded with in his life as a monk-in-training became clear.

A few entries were almost philosophical in their tone, rambling with little purpose through the abstract, theories drifting half-deduced, half-intuited through the words – hopes and dreams of a better world, or failing that, of a quicker destruction. Glimpses of a distant utopia that enthralled him, ponderings on a shatteringly real dystopia that reminded him of nothing as much as his own surroundings, his own life.

He had been brought up – brainwashed – to believe in a glorious, peaceful Heaven, a true reward for true believers, told that so and so and this and that made nirvana and glory in the afterlife, and all his years he had known, on some deep level, that that was wrong, subtly and totally wrong, that something in that view was dislocated, and finally he knew that he was right.

He had always known something was wrong with the world, and to have it proven so conclusively was a sweet relief.

The erratic but brilliant nature that shone through the words captivated Nii, for at last he had found a mind capable of matching his, found a heart as full of rage and contained destruction as his was, a soul as dark and tormented and bright and glorious as his own.

Towards the end of the book (he read it like a holy text, a page at a time, never peeking ahead, letting the unfolding of the diarist's thoughts mirror his own), there were flickers of a deeper plot stretching under the web of schemes the diarist seemed to always be weaving. Whispers of ancient magic and modern science, a daring idea to create a power that would allow him to topple the order of Heaven and create a better rule. To his surprise, the diarist didn't even seem interested in gaining that power, only in seeing that it was wrested away from those who held it. He seemed to have candidates for most of the major positions, though; good men, if his judgment was to be believed.

He had not succeeded; Nii knew this, because why would he be a Fallen if he had? But just because a plan hadn't worked didn't mean it couldn't, and he read on despite the sinking in his heart at every hopeful word, every plan detailed that would never bear fruition.

Slowly, that scheme began to dominate the diary, concrete descriptions of the plans he was making. The details of how he was going to accomplish his plot were irritatingly vague, and once or twice, in the very last pages before the book ended abruptly, he mentioned writing down the formulae and spells in the 'other book'.

The book, Nii realised too late, that he had failed to remove from the vault.

The book that held the other half of the diarist's life.

A few days before his seventeenth birthday, he broke into the vault again.

This time, he did it in the evening, when light still leaked through the ventilation high up near the ceiling, at a time he knew the guards would be changed. He picked the safe open with trembling hands, his back to the door. Almost open now, almost there…the door slid open under his fingers…

'What are you doing, boy?'

A senior monk, standing behind him, puzzled by the presence of an unauthorised person in the vault at this time. The safe was hidden by Nii's back, and he kept it turned.

'Who are you, I sa–' the monk cut off as he saw the half-opened safe and gasped. 'That's–'

Nii exploded into motion before he quite knew what he was doing. He punched the monk, whose name he didn't know, solidly in the stomach; the man doubled over, and he drove the heel of his hand through the soft cartilage of his nose, into his brain, and his head, uncushioned by hair, cracked against the wall of the vault. He lay very still.

'I killed him,' Nii said quietly. 'I killed him.'

Strangely, he felt neither regret nor guilt, simply an absence of anything. Quickly, he seized the book, flipped it open long enough to recognise the familiar handwriting and left the room.

Within the hour, he was out of the temple and heading nowhere in particular, running by night and hiding by day. He knew he was suspected of murder, knew he was a murderer, but that was irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. He regretted nothing.

The book, once he began to read it, was full of scientific theory, formulae and processes scribbled down chaotically. He could understand almost nothing of it. But he knew that, in the West, there were places where the ancient technology was still understood. If there was a place where he would be able to learn what he needed, it would be there.

There was. Remnants of a lost science lingered in the West, and Nii absorbed them like a sponge. He learnt small, innocuous things from each person, small enough that no one ever suspected the full scope of what he was attempting to create. Slowly, the contents of the second book became clear to him.

It wouldn't work. There were too many missing components, too many lost arts, and the plan itself held some flaws that the diarist had yet to work out. But Nii had his own learning now, and he knew he could work around those flaws.

It was pointless. He was no god. He had no entry into heaven; even if he could topple it, it would change nothing.

But still, he continued, in an act of homage of sorts, to the one person in time and space who could have understood what he thought of the world, and why he needed to cast it into chaos. The dark flame of destruction that that diary had lit and stoked within him, giving his rage purpose and his disillusion direction, was fierce within him, and he ached for the end.

On the very last page of the second book, there was a hidden flap. Nii pulled it open, and there was a picture of a man, with a name underneath.

_Tenpou_

The man, he realised, looked quite like him. The same untidy hair, if longer and darker; the glasses, the eyes – even if they were a shade no man in China had – were the same, for the expression in them, calm and raging, calculating and insane at the same time. They even wore the same colours.

He knew what he had to do, knew where to find the last ingredient to complete the work his predecessor had begun. Tenpou – he knew his name at last, and that was bliss all its own – had planned to reconstruct, but he had failed, because he had hoped.

Nii had no hopes, no dreams for a better future; in that, he was more realistic than Tenpou had ever been, and that was why he would succeed where he had failed. The second, he would be the last.

He bought himself a labcoat, and resolved to grow his hair out.

It seemed only appropriate, to wear a similar disguise when he bore a similar burden.

_Do you see? I'll finish what you began. I'll end it. For me. For you. _

He set out again, towards an ancient castle where a king lay trapped in stasis, one hand clutching the diary in his pocket, talisman and mentor and the only thing – the only person – he had ever loved. His guiding light, beckoning the darkness.

_This time, _Nii swore, _the ending will be different. _

Far, far to the east, Cho Gonou slept, and his slumber was uneasy, and disturbed by dreams.


End file.
